What happens if you take a loop, pitch bend it down to half tempo, while mixing in a new loop at full speed? How about if you combine that with some Ableton pitch-sustaining tempo manipulation? Listen for yourself!

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Here’s another experiment, this one with pitch/tempo manipulation up and down. Halfway through creates a pretty cool effect.

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I’m sure some other digital DJ has thought to use this technique. I’ll see if I can work it into the next APU mix.

6 Responses to 'Recursive Beat-Mix'

Love these new techniques; particularly the first one has a nice charm, because it gives the sense that the loop is disappearing and the reappearance on the drop of the loop gives me extra energy from the return.

I love how the loop becomes the bassline for the second loop, but I’m not entirely convinced by the pitch bend, it’s too linear, and you can hear the weird sliding effect when pitch is touched. Maybe you need to lower the pitch in jumps, with each jump happening after the fourth beat? That way it makes sense harmonically.

Another option is a fancy scratch while bending pitch, so you can’t really hear the pitch changing lineary.

In hindsight I agree about the pitch bend being too linear. I only recently started to realize that, with music, most tweaking needs to be done in steps, in a (go figure) musical fashion. I’m going to have to revisit this technique with that in mind. I think the additional filters I’ve started using should help bring the two tracks together a little better, too. Some amount of shared filtering between tracks sometimes makes a big difference to tie things together. For example, a mastering reverb that applies to all tracks gives the impression they each exist in some common space.

Thanks for this, I’m just getting started and it’s useful to hear some examples of how playing with the pitch can be used to transition outside of basic blends

@DJ LoKey That’s probably true but does it bear repeating on this particular blog post? It’s so out of context here that it makes me think you leave that curmudgeonly response on every DJ blog. I’m sure much of the art of letter pressing has been lost since the invention of the printing press. I hate to say it, but many of these turntable artists have gotten so focused on showing off their skills that they don’t bother to play songs people actually want to dance to. Let’s keep it focused on delivering solid music with the best transitions possible, shall we?